Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein spent several hours this morning in front of the House Judiciary Committee in an oversight hearing to answer questions related to Russia’s suspected interference in the 2016 election.

The issue of FBI agent Peter Strzok and the text messages he sent to his mistress, FBI agent Lisa Page, was a focus for GOP members as they attempted to get Rosenstein to answer if Strzok’s overt bias — as evidenced by his own texts — influenced his role as an investigator into supposed collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government operatives.

But taken together, GOP members had a broader, implied, and more singular question: Were the Obama FBI and Department of Justice actively attempting to ensure that Donald Trump was never elected president?

There’s little doubt, based on Strzok’s own texts, that he had a clear bias against Donald Trump (less clear is if he also had a deep affection for Hillary Clinton). This is problematic enough from a public perception angle, as Patterico wrote earlier today. His overt bias was disturbing to his boss as well; he was removed from the investigation into Russian collusion once Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who had tapped him for his investigation team, was alerted to the text exchanges.

The most damning text exchange, one that was mentioned at least 3 times during the hearing, between Strzok and Page was sent in August 2016, and seems to indicate a desire on the part of Strzok to ensure that Trump never saw the Oval Office:

Text-from Peter Strzok to Lisa Page (Andy is Andrew McCabe): “I want to believe the path u threw out 4 consideration in Andy’s office-that there’s no way he gets elected-but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk.It’s like an insurance policy in unlikely event u die be4 you’re 40”

Minnesota has always been a tad eclectic when it comes to politics (no offense to our loyal readers in Minnesota).

But rest assured, voters have made it clear they’re done with the antics of former funny-man Al Franken.

The question that begs an answer is whether they’re willing to tolerate his replacement.

Today Gov. Mark Dayton appointed his Lt. Gov. Tina Smith to fill the vacated seat in the Senate after Franken’s disgraced ouster.

The problem is Smith is a former VP for Planned Parenthood of Minnesota.

With the organization currently under investigation by the DOJ and with defunding measures running through several states (and possibly Congress), Smith may be illegitimate before she even takes a seat in her literal seat.

Minnesota is exchanging a serial sexual assaulter for a woman who used to help head one of the largest abortionists in the world.

Democratic Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton has announced that replacing Al Franken will be Tina Smith, the state’s Lieutenant Governor and former VP of Planned Parenthood in Minnesota, according to Reuters.

Dayton appointment Wednesday morning, and Smith, 59, will run in a special election for the seat next year.

Reactions have already begun to come in, specifically from that of the pro-life crowd.

“Gov. Mark Dayton’s appointment of Tina Smith to represent Minnesota in the U.S. Senate is overwhelmingly disappointing to the state’s pro-life majority. An abortion industry insider, Ms. Smith is a former vice president of Planned Parenthood in Minnesota, the state’s leading performer of abortion. The choice of Ms. Smith is particularly egregious to Minnesota’s pro-life citizens, who will have no representation in the Senate,” he told LifeNews.

He added: “Most Minnesotans are pro-life. They support greater protection for unborn human beings. Minnesotans need someone who will fight for justice for the most vulnerable among us, the unborn.”

You see, the dozen or so Democrats who called for the resignation of Al Franken weren’t uber-pious folks demanding accountability.

They were simply hacks needing an excuse for when it became time to demand the same of President Trump.

And now you have it.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has become the first of the Franken-phobes to call for Trump’s resignation after claims of harassment from several women.

What’s interesting is the timing since we heard virtually nothing from these women during the presidential campaign, which one might have thought would be the most strategic move from the Hillary camp.

It seems the #metoo effort has gone off the rails. It’s also telling that Gillibrand has made rumblings of a 2020 bid.

If you’re a Republican, you see the move as cynical. If you’re in the resistance movement, you may be thinking, “It’s about time!” If you’re somebody looking at the political tea leaves you’re thinking, “This is why she called on Franken to resign,” or “She’s running for president in 2020.”

Whatever you think, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand became the first Senator (and likely not the last) to call on President Trump to resign over allegations of sexual assault. Megyn Kelly interviewed three women who accused Trump of assaulting them, and it’s likely not the last we have heard from the women who accused Trump last year during the presidential campaign:

Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York told CNN on Monday that President Donald Trump should resign over allegations of sexual assault.

“President Trump has committed assault, according to these women, and those are very credible allegations of misconduct and criminal activity, and he should be fully investigated and he should resign,” Gillibrand told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview.

“These allegations are credible; they are numerous, ” said Gillibrand, a leading voice in Congress for combating sexual assault in the military. “I’ve heard these women’s testimony, and many of them are heartbreaking.”

If he does not “immediately resign,” she said, Congress “should have appropriate investigations of his behavior and hold him accountable.”

The dominoes in what we’re calling Muellergate continue to fall this week.

Recall last week that top DOJ official Bruce G. Ohr was demoted last year after it was discovered he had met with the authors of the infamous Russia dossier.

In the days since that report, Fox News has discovered that his wife, Ellie Ohr, was an employee of Fusion GPS.

Yes, that Fusion GPS, the company hired by the DNC and Hillary to run the traps on the dossier and to feed anti-Trump stories to the media.

What’s even more significant is that Ellie Ohr has a long history of writing about Russia and, equally, that Fusion has always been a small firm of less than a dozen employees.

So it stands to reason to speculate that the wife of a senior Justice attorney was contributing to the political dossier on a president-elect whom the department coincidentally began investigating based on the very claims made in that dossier.

According to congressional sources, Simpson and Ohr met sometime around Thanksgiving last year, when President-elect Trump was in the process of selecting his cabinet, and discussed over coffee the anti-Trump dossier, the Russia investigation and what Simpson considered the distressing development of Trump’s victory.

Ohr was associate deputy attorney general at the time which means his boss was Sally Yates. You don’t have to have a suspicious mind to wonder if there was some kind of linkage between this commiseration session and the Russia probe that was beginning to metastasize.

Now there is an interesting twist to the story via Fox News’ James Rosen…this would be the same James Rosen the Obama administration put under surveillance and had labeled as an unindicted co-conspirator in a leak investigation.

A senior Justice Department official demoted last week for concealing his meetings with the men behind the anti-Trump “dossier” had even closer ties to Fusion GPS, the firm responsible for the incendiary document, than have been disclosed, Fox News has confirmed: The official’s wife worked for Fusion GPS during the 2016 election.

Contacted by Fox News, investigators for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) confirmed that Nellie H. Ohr, wife of the demoted official, Bruce G. Ohr, worked for the opposition research firm last year. The precise nature of Mrs. Ohr’s duties – including whether she worked on the dossier – remains unclear but a review of her published works available online reveals Mrs. Ohr has written extensively on Russia-related subjects. HPSCI staff confirmed to Fox News that she was paid by Fusion GPS through the summer and fall of 2016.

It may be true that President Trump has replaced the entire Obama team at all the agencies, but it’s equally true that eight years worth of Obama cronies are still at the helm of most of them. Especially at the State Department which has a long reputation for being uber-liberal already.

And now, on the heels of Trump’s announcement that the U.S. embassy to Israel will be moved to Jerusalem, senior State Department officials just can’t bring themselves to admit the simple fact that Jerusalem lies within the state of Israel, not Palestine (which incidentally isn’t a state at all).

It’s a sad state of affairs in which historical reality clearly has no home at the DOS.

In an incredible display of the State Department’s continuing decades-long hostility toward the State of Israel, spokesmen for the department demonstrated that they are not willing to give up the ghost of their anti-Israel actions on Friday, as they defied the implications of President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem and would not affirm that even though Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Jerusalem was in Israel.

The State Department, in its hatred for Israel, will not list on US passports that Jerusalem is in the State of Israel. As Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro pointed out on Fox News, his niece was born in Jerusalem; her passport only says Jerusalem, and does not mention Israel.

Last time we checked, the Attorney General of the United States serves as the top dog over the Department of Justice.

So what the heck is Jeff Sessions doing these days? From the looks of it, not much. And that’s more or less how Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) sees it as well.

In the early days of the administration when the Russia investigation was just getting started, Sessions recused himself given his affiliation with the Trump campaign.

But it appears he’s recused himself from pretty much everything else, too.

And now with the near-daily revelations of connections and collusion between members of Mueller’s team and the Obama-Hillary campaign machine, one wonders what exactly it might take to get Sessions to call for an investigation.

Rep. Jordan is done waiting to find out, and he’s calling on Sessions to investigate or resign. We agree.

Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan is on a quest to ferret out the truth of evidence suggesting the Clinton campaign colluded with the Russians, resulting in the Trump campaign being spied on. In fact, he demanded that Attorney General Jeff Sessions appoint a special counsel to investigate the matter, or else step down.

Jordan appeared on Fox and Friends Thursday, where he pointed out that all the investigating done into Russian matters had been to find out whether or not the Trump campaign had benefited from their help.

“To date, we have zero evidence of that taking place,” he said.

Jordan laid out what evidence of collusion actually exists, however, and it all points to Clinton.

“But what do we know? We have learned in the last several weeks that the Clinton campaign paid the law firm who paid Fusion GPS, who paid Christopher Steele, the MI-6 agent, who paid Russians,” said Jordan. “The Clinton campaign paid Russians for this report for this dossier, and it’s been reported that this dossier was all dressed up by the government taken to the FISA court and became the basis to spy on Americans.”

“So I think that’s what happened, all the evidence points to that as being what took place,” adding that all FBI Director Christopher Wray, Sessions, et al., have to do to clear this all up is just release the applications to prove him wrong. So far, no one has lifted a finger to do so, leading Jordan to believe that collusion did take place.

Jordan noted that Sessions doesn’t seem to understand where his recusal ends and begins, and gave the attorney general a suggestion.

Holy shazam! We’re now wondering if ANY of Robert Mueller’s investigative team are without ties to the Obama-Clinton political machine.

Now comes one more among the handful of DOJ cronies in the last week associated with the Russia collusion investigation who also are revealed to be hacks for Hillary.

This time it’s top FBI agent Aaron Zebley, who also is the attorney represented Justin Cooper in the congressional investigation into Hillary’s server scandal.

Who is Justin Cooper you ask?

Oh, nobody special…except that he’s the insider who coordinated the setup for Hillary’s private email server, to whom the domain clinton email dot com is registered and the man who handed the ball over to infamous server tech Bryan Pagliano.

So what’s a Hillary IT guy doing at the FBI and why is he also associated with Robert Mueller? Inquiring minds want to know.

Last night, Fox ran a story on another inexplicable (just joking) personnel decision made by special counsel Robert Mueller. This one is of Aaron Zebley, a former FBI agent with very close ties to Robert Mueller. It involves his representation of a key figure in the Hillary Clinton email investigation, a Hillary Clinton crony named Justin Cooper. This is the Wikipedia entry:

Cooper was one of the key persons that help administer Hillary’s private email server. Hillary’s private server as been part of an ongoing Federal investigation. The internet domain, clintonemail.com, was registered to Cooper, not the Clintons, while she was secretary of state. The domain was registered by Cooper before Hillary became secretary of state on January 21, 2009. Hillary used the email, hdr22@clintonemail.com, on her private server while secretary of state, rather than use a dot gov account for all of her secretary of state work. Cooper had no US security clearance or expertise in computer security.[11] Cooper also helped the Clintons with other tech support. Later, Bryan Pagliano, the former IT director for Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, was hired to maintain their private email server while Clinton was secretary of state, while the domain was still registered to Cooper.

An aide to Bill Clinton, Justin Cooper, who helped set up the server, told the F.B.I. that he recalled “two instances where he destroyed Clinton’s old mobile devices by breaking them in half or hitting them with a hammer.”

We promised you more heads would roll at the DOJ, but we didn’t expect it would happen inside of 24 hours.

And so here it is.

There was already gnashing of teeth after reports surfaced that Andrew Weissmann, former head of the DOJ fraud section, had sent an email to acting Attorney General Sally Yates congratulating her on her refusal to enforce President Trump’s travel ban.

It has now been revealed that Weissmann’s anti-Trump sentiments run quite a bit deeper.

He reportedly attended Hillary Clinton’s election night watch party, which is a clear violation of the DOJ’s requirement that officials to remain apolitical.

It also demonstrates the flagrant assumption among the Obama elites at the helm of the agency that Hillary would win without any issues.

And now, it seems, it’s time for payback.

Oh, and one more thing: Weissmann is a lead attorney on the Mueller team. Hmm.

At a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, Republicans focused on Mr. Strzok and Mr. Weissmann, who sent an email to former acting attorney general Sally Yates the night she was fired applauding her decision to instruct Justice Department lawyers not to defend Mr. Trump’s initial travel ban.

“I am so proud,” Mr. Weissmann wrote in the subject line of an email, which was released by the conservative group Judicial Watch. Mr. Weissmann also attended Hillary Clinton’s election-night party at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York, according to people familiar with his attendance.

At the time, Mr. Weissmann was running the Justice Department’s fraud section, which is a senior career post within the agency. In his current role, Mr. Weissmann has been leading the case against Paul Manafort , the former Trump campaign chairman, and Rick Gates, a campaign aide. Both men have been indicted on lobbying and financial crimes, charges they deny and which aren’t related to the Trump campaign.

Beverly Young Nelson has finally admitted that she forged a portion of the infamous high school yearbook that she and attorney Gloria Allred used as proof of her accusations against U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore.

And in yet another blow to the credibility of ABC News, the disgraced, left-wing network downplayed the bombshell by presenting this admission of forgery as adding “notes” to the inscription. Worse still, the reporter actually coaches Nelson, puts words in her mouth, downplay the enormous significance of her deceit.

“Nelson admits she did make notes to the inscription,” ABC News tells us. “But the message was all Roy Moore.”

And then, after a woman admits to forging a document used in a campaign to destroy the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Alabama, ABC News quickly moves on as though it is not news of extraordinary consequence.

When Sen. Al Franken announced his resignation amid sexual misconduct allegations Thursday the Minnesota Democrat emphasized what he and all Democrats consider a glaring irony: A Republican accused of molesting an underage girl is on the verge of being elected to the Senate and President Trump sits in the White House, accused of sexually harassing or assaulting 19 women.

“Those who trash legitimate accusers, it could be the president, it could be Roy Moore, it could be anybody, there is going to be, and needs to be, a price to be paid for it,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., told reporters Thursday. “Now it’s clear that behavior of this kind before you take office is something that the body should take seriously and it should be even-handed if it’s a Democrat or a Republican.”

Franken is beloved by his colleagues. Conyers, Congress’ longest-serving member, is a civil rights icon. But, with the momentum behind the “Me Too” movement gaining steam, Democrats were forced to cut ties, showing they’re serious about a “zero-tolerance” policy. And what, at first, appeared a rejection of Moore by Republicans, changed in the last week when Trump and the Republican National Committee rushed to his defense and poured money into his campaign. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., also appeared to walk back his criticism of Moore and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, backed Trump’s endorsement saying, “Many of the things that [Moore] allegedly did were decades ago.”